This story is part of “To Live and Drive in Los Angeles,” a series of short stories recounted based on local writer Joe Eckstein’s real, personal experiences in Los Angeles since he moved here nearly a decade ago, spanning the wide range of homes, jobs, people, and drives he has encountered along the way.
A version of this piece first appeared in Issue 01: Lore, Factory Settings’ first print issue, published October 2026.
I still like Coyote Bill despite what happened.
My first place in L.A. was a block North of Exposition Boulevard, where I rented an AirBnB from a Chinese USC student named Eric. Eric was interning in Tokyo for June.
I noticed that Black men in red outfits stood at the corner of every block. I cruised down the street and searched for my new place on West 37th as my eyes darted back and forth from Google Maps to the passing houses. I soon learned these red-clad Black men were neighborhood security hired by the University of Southern California.
It was a month later, and I still hadn’t found a proper job. Given my limited finances, I opted to live somewhere cheap once my AirBnB expired. I saw on Facebook that a shady land company had recently purchased a duplex a few miles south, in South Central—eight rooms, four people a room, two bunk beds per room, $400 per tenant. The land company needed “chill and artistic” tenants at their new location on 56th and Vermont. They later accepted a man named Joseph who walked into the common area with his penis hanging out. Joseph professed his love to a resident named Armani. She didn’t reciprocate the affection.
I knocked on the door at 56th and Vermont, and a sixty-something dude who introduced himself as “O.G.” (his name was Rob) answered the door and ushered me in. O.G. instructed me to take my shoes off upon entering—he was adamant that all residents adopt that practice. I complied—a habit I still maintain to this day.
O.G. showed me the common area, where I met most of the current tenants. There was no television in the common area. The common area consisted of couches that lined three-of-four walls in such a way as to encourage communication. I liked that. And most of the tenants were inhabiting the common area. Everyone was talking. I couldn’t give a fuck less that no one was white—everyone was talking.
They clocked me the moment they saw me.
There was Armani, a St. Louis-born actress, Byron, a St. Louis-born entertainment-mogul hopeful, Ken, a Chicago-born dude who was six-foot-six and who was going to DJ school with a child and wife back home. There was Josh, a hopeful singer with a beautiful voice from Richmond, and Miguel, also a talented musician, also from Richmond. D’Angelo went to Miguel’s high school. I think Miguel was proud of that. There was Sam, a Kenyan-born family man who traveled to L.A. from Atlanta to get his doctorate at USC, and Ana, a fifty-something Filipina woman who was the size of a toothpick but had the personality of a steak knife. Ana had rented her bunk to escape an abusive husband. Ana liked cooking for the house, even if it was out of her own wallet. There was also Justin, a talented illustrator and fashionista currently enrolled in fashion school. Finally, there was Rosie, a San Diego local who moved to L.A. when her relationship with her boyfriend was on the up-and-up, and rented her bunk when the relationship went belly-up.
Anyways, they all clocked me.
O.G. smiled nervously and introduced me, and I said hello. I saw it, they saw it, and O.G. knew it: the land company probably encouraged O.G. to bring a white kid in the mix so other white kids, ideally studying at USC, would tour and say, “Hey there’s another white kid, maybe this place ain’t so bad.”
I came to said conclusion the minute O.G. offered to show me the western part of the duplex—a part of the duplex that no one had yet inhabited. This struck me as odd. The numbers didn’t add up. If there were twenty-four bunks, and only thirteen tenants on the east side of the duplex, why would I just get one on the completely untouched west side area of the duplex? O.G. took me to the west side and showed me one of three rooms. He told me that each room was named after the hometown of its first tenant. There was a San Diego. There was a Houston. There was a Richmond. There was a Tijuana. Now there could be a St. Louis.
I moved my stuff into St. Louis the very next day. That evening, I walked over to the east side of the duplex. Most of the tenants were sitting around, shooting the shit. I sat down. I wanted to hang out in the “communal space.” I wasn’t doing anything important on the west side of the duplex—the St. Louis side. The tenants were inquisitive, yet graceful. I went from person to person extending my hand. I probably did that dumb flourish I still do where I fist-bump afterwards. Okay, I really didn’t do that, but there’s any number of embarrassing moments I could recount. Unfortunately, I don’t think I shook anyone’s hand. But, I sat and introduced myself again.
Josh, the aspiring singer, was arguing that Whitney Houston was simply just better than Michael Jackson. Nobody agreed, not even me.
“Everybody in Kenya love Michael, man—Whitney good, but she second to Madonna. Nobody second to Michael,” said Sam, the Kenyan doctorate student from Atlanta. Everybody audibly agreed with Sam.
The conversation then changed towards rap. Ken, the aspiring DJ from Chicago, argued with Justin, the fashion designer, that mumble rap was bullshit. Josh remained in protest of the consensus that Michael was better than Whitney. I looked at Josh.
“I like R&B better than rap,” I chimed in.
“Thank you, he gets it!”
“So what kind of music do you like?”
“I generally like anything that makes me cry.”
“What makes you cry?”
“Stevie Wonder, Tame Impala, Kanye, Kendrick, Radiohead, D’Angelo, Joni Mitchell…”
Nobody seemed too impressed, but Justin asked if we could play a song I liked, and for some reason I chose the dorkiest white-boy song imaginable: “The Less I Know The Better” by Tame Impala. The reception wasn’t warm, but it was tolerated. Thirty minutes passed, and the conversation turned to race. They sussed me out a bit over music—I do the same to people—but I figured this was the moment the nonwhite jury would reach its consensus. Rosie was monologuing about the perceived awkwardness surrounding the word “Black” in social situations. Rosie was well-respected. She was notoriously blunt.
Rosie swung her head around and addressed me.
“And, I’m sorry, but the world is gonna keep getting blacker and browner, and dere ain’t nothin’ you can do to stop that.”
Rosie pawed at my arm playfully.
“Uh, that’s—I—I really don’t care, I mean, that’s cool with me.”
I guess that was good enough. Rosie smiled. Rosie rested her head on my shoulder. Rosie then abruptly recoiled when she realized that she put her head on my shoulder. My first morning on the east side of the duplex, Rosie and Justin brought me two waffles, two sausage patties, and a few strawberries. To this day, there are few acts of thoughtful kindness I remember as distinctly as that.
The only other time Rosie ever put her head on my shoulder was on the night we shared some mixed drinks twelve hours before she drove back to San Diego. She cried a little. I remember thinking to myself, “Who cares? It’s a two-hour drive. What’s the big deal?”
The subsequent weeks at the slowly-filling west side of the duplex were good. I landed a job and made mediocre money. I didn’t have to share St. Louis with any other tenants. But, soon enough, I had to meet my first new bunkmate. The week prior, I had seen O.G. giving him a tour on Zoom, carrying a laptop and spinning in circles to show him the digs. Within eight days, the new tenant was sleeping across from me—he was a white boy named Coyote Williams.
“You can call me Bill or Coyote or Coyote Bill. Either way. I don’t really care, man. Call me whatever.”
“Like I’m going to call your ass Coyote Bill…” I thought to myself. To his credit, though, if there was ever a dude to be referred to as “Coyote Bill” it was this fucking guy. I liked Coyote Bill. Despite his titanic misjudgments in social settings, despite his being the sort of white trash I’d grown up around in Missouri, and despite my knowing all too well what to expect from Coyote Bill, I sensed sincerity and thoughtfulness when he spoke. He was a thief, but he only stole from me a miniature camera slate, a bullet keychain trinket, a few cups of Aunt Jemima, and a half-eighth of good weed. He never rifled through my wallet. He wasn’t violent. He was good conversation, which in my opinion made my own misgivings—and perhaps the accusations that were soon to come—forgivable.
Coyote Bill was what my seventh-grade self would have called a “wigger.” I still don’t know how else to describe a white-trash dude that talks Black but don’t walk Black. It wasn’t for Coyote Bill’s lack of trying, though. Coyote Bill bobbed and weaved his cranium as he walked, and slouched his shoulders and bounced over-exaggeratedly with every step. I still don’t know if this all was done purposefully or in blissful ignorance.
Coyote Bill was from Detroit. I dug his talk.
A new west-duplex tenant named Leah asked what his Detroit neighborhood was like.
“I mean, it’s the hood, but it’s darker. You want weed, coke, pussy, young pussy, heroin, you go to Brightmoor.”
It was lost on Coyote Bill that the eighteen-year-old woman who had asked the question was, in fact, an eighteen-year-old woman. O.G. promptly reprimanded him.
“Hey man, don’t use that language here! There are ladies! Some gentleman…”
But, I could see that Coyote Bill took O.G.’s reprimand to heart. Coyote Bill apparently grew up with his grandparents in Brightmoor. Coyote Bill never knew his mom or dad, but he spoke highly of his grandparents, even if he did let slip the occasional allusion to physical abuse. Coyote Bill and I would smoke weed together, we’d talk into the night about the midwest, we’d talk about our work. He wanted to be a comedian, but he didn’t quite have the chops. He had landed a job as a bouncer at Jay Leno’s nightclub in Redondo Beach. He’d usually get home around five or six A.M.
Usually, I lumbered up the stairs in my grimy workclothes at about six P.M., just as Coyote Bill was preparing to depart for Jay Leno’s club. Such was the case when I found him pacing frantically around St. Louis that evening when I returned to the room after a hard day’s work.
“Yo, man, have you seen my lunchbox?”
“No.”
“Dude… I’m so fucked if I can’t find my lunchbox. I need it with me. I’m so fucked.”
“Yeah, I haven’t seen it, man, sorry, but I’m going to get on dinner s—”
“Are you sure you haven’t seen it?”
“No, man.”
Coyote Bill rummaged through the St. Louis closet. He sighed in relief after finding something.
“Ahh… there it is. There’s the lunchbox. Alright, alright… all good!”
“Alright, well, I’m going to take a shower.”
“You wanna know what’s in it?”
I hesitated.
“Sure. Let me see. But, you gotta give me a deal, though...”
Coyote Bill threw the lunchbox on my bottom bunk and unzipped it, unveiling a variety of sex toys: whips, vibrators, anal beads, handcuffs.
“You see, that whole ‘independent Black woman’ thing is just a fuckin’ show. They wanna be manhandled. They wanna be told what to do. This is free fuckin’ real estate, man.”
“Damn.”
“Especially if you’re a white boy.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
About three weeks had passed since that strange, strange interaction. I could tell that Coyote Bill wasn’t being embraced in the same way I was. It all came to a boiling point one morning as I was returning home from a night shift where I coordinated and cleaned squirting blood on a friend’s indie shoot for twelve hours in fucking Newport Beach. On my way back to South Central, I had to park on a highway offshoot and sleep for an hour. When I got back to 56th and Vermont, I parked my car and wanted nothing more than to go back up to St. Louis and crash for a few hours. Upon entering the west side of the duplex, I was accosted by Byron. I soon noticed that nearly all the tenants were sitting around patiently.
“Joe! Where’s Bill? You know where he’s at?”
“No idea. He usually comes home around this time—seven A.M., or so. He’s not here?”
“No, he’s not.”
“I guess he’s at work, or maybe he’s leaving soon. I dunno.”
“Then we’ll be right here.”
“What, uh… What’s going on here?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Byron spun around in a sassy flourish and beelined back to one of the seats. I considered resigning to St. Louis for some sleep, but there was no way I was about to miss whatever the hell was about to transpire when Coyote Bill walked in. So, I, too, beelined to the nearest open seat. My work schedule and minimum-wage paychecks precluded my visits to the local movie theaters. This was the next closest thing. Josh, Ken, Armani, Byron, and everyone else—they were unusually quiet, sitting like disciplined deer-hunters.
Ten minutes later, Coyote Bill walked in. He was met with thirteen tenants ambushing him in a cacophonous swarm of accusations and threats. Finally, Byron spoke up, and everyone went silent. Despite being a flamboyant gay man, Byron knew when to tap into his street. Coyote Bill recoiled at Byron’s intensity. Any reasonable man would have, white or Black.
“Bill, sit your ass down!”
Byron put his face six inches from Coyote Bill’s face, mean-mugged him, and guided him firmly towards an empty space on one of the “communal couches.” All the tenants conglomerated around the Byron Keaton v. Coyote Bill tribunal transpiring in front of them. Everyone had something to say—but Byron summed it up.
“Bill you try and pull that shit one more time im’a knock those rotten yellow teeth out and beat yo’ white ass like the nigga you wish you were.”
“I’m mad!” said Dylan, a new Hispanic resident from Alaska.
Coyote Bill hung his head. I assumed that Coyote Bill had been pegged for who he was: a white man who liked Black girls. But, I didn’t yet know the extent of their discovery.
“I don’t know what came over me. I’m ashamed that everyone knows what happened. I came at the whole situation sideways.”
“You lucky you ain’t sideways!”
Coyote Bill stood up. He hung his head. Armani went to the kitchen. Coyote Bill turned around to proceed up the stairway to St. Louis. Armani came back out of the kitchen.
“Yo, Bill!”
Coyote Bill turned around to a full glass of milk catapulting from Armani’s hand. It splashed all over him.
“Boy, you lucky that’s milk and not piss.”
Coyote Bill’s tall ass with multiple streams of milk trickling from his dangling, oily hair is an image that will never leave me. The man was speechless. Armani left, and then Byron left, and then everyone else left. Coyote Bill, sopping wet and drenched in milk, proceeded up the stairs to St. Louis. It was just me who remained in the west side of the duplex’s common area.
I felt bad for Coyote Bill, and, confused as to why what just happened had just happened, I walked up to St. Louis about two minutes later. He was toweling himself off. I asked him,
“What the hell was that?”
“I just… I just feel like no one really knows where I’m coming from…”
“Bill, what happened?”
“I… I know this girl back home. You know? Back in Detroit. We’re cool. She’s cool. Saturday night everyone had gone to bed, so we were on the phone. One thing led to another, and we started having, you know, phone sex. We started having phone sex in the common area.”
“That’s a little weird, but I don’t think that validates what you just went through.”
“Well, we weren’t just having phone sex. We were roleplaying.”
“Okay…”
“We were slave-slavemaster roleplaying.”
“Fuckin’ A, dude…”
“Like I said, some Black chicks like that. ‘You break those eggs one more time bitch and I’ll whip your hide raw—’”
Coyote Bill hung around for another couple weeks. He was persona non grata. Nobody wanted to talk to him. I don’t blame them. You can’t bounce back from that. You just can’t—especially in that environment. Two consenting adults who want to roleplay—who am I to judge? To do such a thing in a house full of Black people, though, qualifies as one of the titanic misjudgments I spoke of earlier. Part of me suspects that Coyote Bill was titillated by the risk. In my opinion, the thrill wasn’t worth the spill. Three weeks later, Coyote Bill parked in front of a fire hydrant. His car was towed, and it was $1,200 for him to retrieve it. Coyote Bill could not afford such a hefty cost. He took a Greyhound back to Detroit.
That’s the last I ever heard of him.
